Poem: Ladies of the Sarasota Sewer

Jackie Wang’s poem takes its title, in part, from Djuna Barnes’ 1936 queer love novel “Nightwood”: “ladies of the upper gutter taking their last walk, strolling in their last Rotten Row.” The rhythm of the poem echoes the rhythm of life that the poem describes. Some readers will already know this life. For them, for us, the poem is an acknowledgment, one that I don’t often see in contemporary poetry. Poets, however, were once experts in gutter rapture. Like Francois Villon or Charles Baudelaire before her, Wang writes poetry that reminds us that there is more to life than the grim fatalism of to-do lists and bank accounts. The poem rushes forward, heads towards the edge. So they catch the lover-stealers. The invoice is due. The poem slows down. The heart breaks. This was, after all, an elegy. Despite the lively emotion of her cadence, “those days”, those lovers, are gone. What remains is poetry.

Ladies of the Sarasota Sewer

By Jackie Wang

in those days
we ate garbage at every meal
I dove into the dumpsters with
the atlanta boys
he got chubby in a bucket
of expired breakfast bars

the fine table was stealing
Continental breakfast
in all nearby hotels
stealing dannon tepid
yogurts and bananas
of mediocre diffusion

we only got caught once
they gave us an account
We did not have money
i said i would go home
to try to get some money
and when i left
they let you go without paying
Thinking that I had left you in the lurch

all the love i see is gone

we lived on smoke
the adrenaline of our
breaking bones

anna boyer He is a poet and essayist. His memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. jackie wang is a poet, academic, multimedia artist, and assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where she researches race, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police. She is the author of “Prison Capitalism” (Semiotext(e), 2018), the collection of poems “The sunflower cast a spell to save us from the void” (Nightboat Books, 2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the upcoming collection of experimental essays “Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun” (Semiotext(e), 2023).